Editor's note: Women in Insurance Leadership honoree profiles will roll out over the course of the week. For the full list,
Robin Gordon originally planned to have a career in medicine. But, after a conversation with a family friend who was a software developer, she changed her plans after becoming intrigued by work in the digital world.
"She talked about the logic and interesting problem solving she got to do all the time," says Gordon. After that conversation, she. "I took an aptitude test and aced it and just loved it. The whole test was puzzles, and I was always into puzzles and problem solving when I was a kid."
That led Gordon, who is now chief data and analytics officer at MetLife, to a degree in information systems and economics. Her current role is the first C-level role of its kind at MetLife, combining data and analytics responsibilities. MetLife has a storied 154-year history – and now holds 24 petabytes of data as part of its operations. That presented Gordon with the challenge of piecing together that data into forms useful for analytics and supporting insurance business decisions and management.
One product of Gordon's efforts is enhancing the experience of MetLife customers.
"We're really getting diligent about creating online digital experiences that are rich and give the customer a sense that we really know them, as you might experience in other retail type platforms or online experiences," she says. "We want to create the same sort of environment in the insurance market, which is a little bit unusual. In the past, insurance has fewer customer interactions over the entire customer lifecycle because of the nature of the industry, but those interactions are critical moments in a customer's life and it's important that we get them right."
Over the past year, Gordon and colleagues have built a new enterprise data strategy designed to make the most out of MetLife's data. "We put governance to it, not just to manage risk, but to also enable it and unlock it and create more transparency into the data that we do have and then understanding the techniques that we could use to manage that data and transform that data," she says.
The new data strategy also aims to elevate data for analytical focus, "both in the context of making better decisions, whether that's embedded in our claims processing to highlight fraud or automate claims, or auto adjudication through better understanding of our data," she says.
Data and analytics efforts are applied to improve on agents' work, as well, according to Gordon. Managers can better understand agent performance to match the best equipped agent to the right customer, and agents generally will gain more insight into operations, she adds.
Gordon's data and analytics efforts required collecting data spread across "thousands of different systems and thousands of different types of systems," she says. "To use data more effectively, it's knowing how to put it together in a way meaningful in the experiences and decision making pieces. That's a pretty significant hurdle that we continue to tackle day by day."
Often, executives develop intuition and make decisions based on their intuition. "We're trying to elevate that intuition, and use a baseline of facts and data to help us with those decisions," Gordon says. "It's a cultural change above and beyond the technical challenges we face."
